Archive for February, 2012

53 days into my One Year Chronological Bible reading plan in PocketBible and I’m already significantly behind. I blame Leviticus. It gets me every year. Thankfully, PocketBible has those convenient “reschedule” options. If (or when) you find yourself in my position, PocketBible actually offers several scheduling options that can help. Here is the best way to use each one:

Set First Reading to Today – use this option to start tracking progress in any devotional book. You’ll get an option to erase any previous progress (or not).

Set Current Reading as Today – use this option when you have been reading out of a particular devotional book for a while and now decide to start tracking your progress. Or if you’ve been using the printed version of the book and want to switch to PocketBible. When you choose this option, you’ll be asked what you want to do about progress tracking. You can mark all readings through yesterday or today as read.

Catch Up – use this option if, like me, you’ve fallen behind in a plan you have been otherwise consistently reading (you don’t want to use this option if you’ve been reading and marking days here and there because you may get unexpected results). PocketBible will change the start date of the book to put you back on schedule through yesterday or today (you choose).

Reset Progress Data – use this option if you just want to start over and erase any progress in the book. This can be done when you’ve only partially completed a book OR if you have completed an entire book, so you can start it over again.

If you are a visual learner (or you just like videos), here is Laridian president, Craig Rairdin, explaining how the “catch up” feature is used on the iPhone.

If you’re using PocketBible on your iPhone or iPad, you may have noticed a message on the “Add/Remove Books” screen saying that many of your books have been updated. You’ll also see a similar message if you use PocketBible for Windows or one of the older mobile platforms and visit the “Downloads” page in your account at our website.

I mentioned in a recent Android update that we were going to have to rebuild all our books to support some new search features in the Android version of PocketBible. That turned out to be a 6-8 week rather than a 1-2 week exercise. Part of the reason is that since we had to touch every book that we publish, we used that opportunity to fix all the reported errors that we had on file for each book.

Many of these errors are all but invisible to the user. As a result we tend to let them accumulate for a while rather than jumping on every typo and minor formatting error as soon as we hear about it. The problem is that those things add up after a while and frankly our list had gotten overwhelming. We had one BookBuilder customer who volunteered to help a while back. He did a few books but then gave up. So this seemed like a great opportunity to just clean that list out since we had to look at every single book anyway.

In order to minimize the load on the server from everyone being told all their books had been updated, we created a way we could update the files on the server without the server thinking they had been updated. So the only time we allowed the server to know a particular book had been updated was if it was on the list of books in which noticeable changes had been made. If all we did was change “Laridian Electronic Publishing” to “Laridian, Inc.” (because one is our name and one is not) in the book’s meta data, we didn’t bother to have the server tell you about the change. But if we fixed a number of links or typographical errors — something you would notice — we had the server tell you about it.

We were also a little concerned about the load on the server if everyone went out and started re-downloading all their books. So we didn’t make a big deal about it, and we uploaded the books a few at a time over the last couple of months.

So if PocketBible or our website is telling you that a book has been updated, it means we fixed something that you might notice if you were paying close attention. In reality all the books were updated, but none of our programs currently make use of the new features that necessitated the update. So it’s only necessary to update the ones that say they need to be updated, and then you really only need to update them if you’re picky about every little typo.